Visual Studio 2005 SP1 released – details about changes for web tools

As many of you may heard Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was officially released several days ago. There have already been a couple of blog posts announcing the release from ScottGu and Soma. One item of feedback I saw on those posts was a request for more information about the actual fixes in SP1.

I’m writing this blog post to provide more information about the SP1 fixes in the “web tools” area — specifically those pieces of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express used to target ASP.NET. I’ll also include a list of bug fixes we made to “web tools” so people can have more detail into what was fixed. NOTE: the information here only pertains to “web tools” in Visual Studio 2005, and does not represent everything that was fixed in SP1 (there were many other bug fixes in parts of Visual Studio outside of “web tools”).

If anyone out there is using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express to do ASP.NET development, I highly recommend installing SP1. With SP1 you get the following big benefits for ASP.NET development (I’ll cover each in more detail below):

Web Application Projects is a new feature that is made available in Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Web Application Projects uses a project-file just like Visual Studio 2003 web projects, and provides most of the same functionality available in web projects in Visual Studio 2003. If you are converting a web project from Visual Studio 2003, Web Application Projects makes the conversion pretty much seamless. If you would like to know more about this new feature, there is much more detailed information about Web Application Projects here.

2. Improvements to performance of ASP.NET features in the IDE

SP1 has several improvements to increase performance of the Visual Studio IDE when doing ASP.NET development.

The most noticeble improvement to customers will likely be when editing ASPX pages in “source” view. Rather than re-stating everything we’ve done here, I’ll link instead to this great post from ScottGu describing all the things we do to make ASPX editing faster in SP1.

Improved IDE performance when a very large number files exist in the bin folder of your application.

Improved initial loading time of built-in Visual Studio development server.

Fixed memory leak when using Wizard inside a View or MultiView control.

Open XML file with links to external files was very slow. This has been fixed.

I also highly recommend that people read ScottGu’s more general blog post about performance tuning the IDE for ASP.NET development here.

3. Bug Fixes

Below is the list of bug fixes we made in the “web tools” area in Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Once again, please remember, these are only fixes to “web tools” and do not represent all of the fixes in SP1.

The testing tools in Visual Studio 2005 work with managed code (e.g. – VB / C#). VS 2005 also has a web recorder that allows you to create automated web tests from a browser to do load testing on the server. Specifically the JavaScript code that runs in the browser cannot be tested in an automated fashion using VS2005, however the rest of the application can still be tested in an automated manner. Hope this helps.

Point 6. On performance can be mitigated somewhat by turning off features like Tools | Options | Environment | Startup = Show Empty Environment, Environment | Help | Dynamic Help uncheck all, Debugging | Edit and Continue disable.

Point 2. Needs some refinement. devenv /upgrade on a single vbproj does produce a WAP project, but not setup as a Sub-Project in IIS as the GUI upgrade wizard now does. Multi-project .sln conversion result in web site applications. The problem remains of having document control switches in devenv /upgrade to specify WAP and Sub-Project.

Point 5. Confounds me. How can the VS team pull the UI for databinding to strongly typed datasets. Datasets are a natural interface point to external non-SQL source via XML. They are ideal containers for passing data between web controls, business logic, and external persistence systems. Why must I now mess around with DataSourceObjects and an artificial CRUD model when VS2003 allowed me to move hierarchical data directly to my BL and MV database, and provided a databinding UI so everyone involved does not have to master databinder.eval syntax.

We need Visual Studio to provide two-way databinding from textboxes, checkboxes, dropdownlists, grids etc to dataset elements (table["x"].rows["y"].items["z"]) in datasets with multiple level parent-child-grandchild tables where there is strong typing and relations defined on the table. And it would be nice to keep the same aspx source code format so we don’t all have to write conversion code for our existing 2003 code base.

Sorry to hear of the issue you are encountering. There were no significant changes that the unit test team made in SP1 and therefore it should not have affected the running of your unit tests. Please try re-installing VS. If the issue persists, please contact me so that we can try to resolve it. Thanks.

The evisceration of the IComponent design time access which previously provided a design time bridge between WebControls and Data Access Components is absolutely shocking and devastating!

Daniel Cazzulino’s postings on this are dead on.

Nikhil Kothari’s pursuit of a declaritive model does not make up for the severe injury this has done to the power of IComponent and IComponent.Initialization which has been lost to those of us writing sophisticated custom ASP.NET web controls.

"Unable to open http://localhost. Visual Web Developer does not support opening Sharepoint Web Sites. See help for more details." I read in this blog that this error was fixed in sp1. What am I missing?

As many of you may heard Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was officially released several days ago. There have already been a couple of blog posts announcing the release from ScottGu and Soma . One item of feedback I saw on those posts was a request for more informatio